Je tu il elle

Chantal Akerman's Je tu il elle came out in 1974. It was her first fiction feature, made the year before Jeanne Dielman, when she was twenty-four, on an extremely limited budget, and Akerman plays the lead herself. In the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll it entered the upper tier alongside her better-known film, and it has since become a foundational work of the feminist and lesbian cinema canon.

It unfolds in three movements. In the first, Akerman's character is alone in a bare Brussels apartment for what seems to be several days of self-imposed isolation, eating sugar from a paper bag and writing and rewriting a letter she will not send. In the second she is on the road, hitchhiking in the cab of a truck driver (a very young Niels Arestrup, years before his French leading roles), and the chapter builds up in long observational silences. In the third she arrives at the apartment of a former female lover (Claire Wauthion) and they spend a night together.

Long static takes, no conventional plot, and Akerman's own body and performance at the centre (distant, observant, occasionally uncomfortable) give the film a formal seriousness that was unusual for the period. Its last movement is one of the most-discussed representations of female sexuality in 1970s cinema. The tradition of European feminist film-making that Jeanne Dielman would extend the following year starts here.